Wednesday, December 28, 2011

In a flurry of last minute legislative activity, Governor Jerry Brown, that perennial civil servant who will hopefully retire one of these days soon without ever having held a real, private sector job, signed into effect AB 131, the infamous "Dream Act." One of 760 new laws (!) this year advanced by those otherwise unemployable Sacramento politicians, that's the companion piece to earlier legislation he previously signed which provided access to private funding for illegal aliens to attend California colleges and universities as of January 1, 2012. This one, remarkably, but perhaps not surprisingly, provides public taxpayer money for that same purpose as of January 1, 2013, providing an effort currently underway to gather signatures for a petition drive to overturn this legislative overreach are unsuccessful.

That leaves me with a question. If you can't work in the U.S. of A. without proving that you're here legally, how does providing those here illegally with a college education who have already consumed at least three and as many as twelve years of lower-level schooling at a cost to the taxpayers of more than $10,000 per annum make any fiscal sense at all? So they go on to college at public expense and graduate and still can't legally find employment. Accept that then we, the taxpayers, are out even more of our hard-earned dollars.

I'm thinking that four years from now when the ink is drying on the sheepskins of a whole bunch of newly-minted illegal alien college graduates, there will be no other choice but to extend the term of the current liberal largesse. Since they will still be illegal and still won't be able to find work, but will be much better educated, perhaps we should provide them with a graduate degree as well. A nice MBA, maybe. Or a Masters in Social Work. After all, the only place they will then still be welcome is in the hallowed halls of academia. And then how about a doctorate? Yeah, that's the ticket. A doctorate would be nice, maybe in International Relations or Criminal Justice or Latino Studies. Because then they could become professors and continue to maintain their "legal" illegal status while teaching others what it means to be a very well educated shadow resident.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

I don't know about you, but I'm growing weary of waiting for all those rich people out there to finally begin paying their fair share. We all know there's a huge pot of money somewhere and the rich managed to somehow get there before the rest of us and took more than they deserved and now they won't give it back! And that must be true because they're the ones with the big houses and the big cars and the big planes and the big boats and we're the ones with the masters degrees in Transgender Studies and Medieval Poetry and no jobs and we can't pay our student loans! All we ask is that they finally cough up what they actually owe!

Oh, I know what you're going to say. You're going to tell me that the rich already pay the vast majority of all Federal income taxes. That the top two-tenths of one percent pay more than 20% of all taxes; that the top 2% pays 40%; that the top 5% pays 70% and that the bottom 47% of all wage earners pay no income taxes at all! Well, Mr. and Mrs. Know-it-All, I just don't care, and neither do the rest of the 99%ers. The rich need to pay more! Redistributor-in-Chief Obama and past, present and no doubt future Governor Brown (aka Civil Servant for Life) tell us so and we know they wouldn't lie to us, right? Obama is campaigning every day for wealth redistribution. "At some point you've made enough money," he's told us. "You've got to spread the wealth around. It's good for everybody," he told Joe the Plumber. Obama says the millionaires and billionaires, you know, those nasty folks making more than $250,000 a year (!), should pay more so the rest of us can continue to enjoy our perks and entitlements. It's working well in Europe, right? And Brown is even advocating a ballot measure for next June which would require a tax surcharge of up to 2% on all those who make more than a certain amount. No matter that California is already in the top one or two states as far as income taxation is concerned, and that the wealthy are leaving in droves. Well I say, why stop there? I mean, who's better at determining how to redistribute "excess" earnings? Those who earned it, or the Government?

Even though the "rich" are the folks who operate the businesses that hire almost everybody in America, I say in the interest of "fairness" they should be required to pay much, much more. After all, it's okay to extoll the virtues of capitalism and studying hard and getting ahead and keeping your nose to the grindstone, but once the rich have gotten that way, it seems reasonable to change the rules a bit and penalize them for doing so. Who the heck do they thing they are, anyway? So I say, if a little bit is good, more must be better. So why not simply tax everybody who makes more than a politically correct amount at 100% of their earnings? Pick their bones clean! Teach them a lesson! Punish them! Who cares that there would be no more new MicroSofts, or Apples, or Googles, or E-Bays, or Amazons, or McDonalds or Trader Joes, or Starbucks, etc., etc., etc. As Obama has stated, even if lowering tax rates would increase Federal revenues, he'd still rather bump up tax rates on the rich. We're talking fairness here, right?

Oh wait. I just put pencil to paper and came up with a simple fact: If we take 100% of the earnings of the 249,000 millionaires in America, leaving them without a single dime, we'd bring in a grand total of $1.2 Trillion into the Treasury. Or, put another way, two hundred billion less than what it would take to cover our increased Federal debt of $1.4 Trillion for just this Fiscal Year alone. Whoops! On second thought, maybe we should leave them with some of what they have earned so they can continue to operate their filthy businesses and keep on hiring those of us who aren't occupying someplace or other and making some of their evil profits so we can continue to buy big screen TVs and double mocha lattes and ugly little overpriced, plug-in electric weenie cars. After all, we've got to save the planet, right? Maybe we should just leave the successful alone to continue creating wealth in our society and finally decide to spend a little bit less as a country for a change. After all, when was the last time a poor person hired somebody?